


Les bleuets sont bleus, j'aime mes amours

by renquise



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-27
Updated: 2011-02-27
Packaged: 2017-10-15 23:31:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/166012
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/renquise/pseuds/renquise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>February fourteenth is apparently a day for megalomaniacs as well as lovers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Les bleuets sont bleus, j'aime mes amours

**Author's Note:**

> A shameless Valentine's Day bit to follow [Guests of Each Other's Senses](http://archiveofourown.org/works/147939). With a terrible title and all!

They’re on smoke break when Red pops the question, quite without warning.

“Out of idle curiosity, what will you be getting our dear mutual friend for Saint Valentin?”

Spy freezes. Hot ash drops off the end of his cigarette, and he spends a good few seconds hopping around and trying to keep it from burning a hole in his trousers.

Having regained his composure, he drops back down next to Red, lighting another cigarette to buy himself some time.

February fourteeth. It was only a few weeks away. Had it really been so long since his last relationship that the date had almost gone completely unnoticed?

“Well, what are you getting her?” Spy asks, tapping his cigarette over the halved Bonk can that served as an ashtray.

“I asked first.”

“Think of it as asking for your sage advice.”

“A gun.” Red taps his chin thoughtfully. “Same as last time. But you would know that, I think—you were following us that day, weren’t you?”

“She must have a veritable arsenal somewhere, then,” Spy mutters, “Really? A gun, every time?”

Red shrugs. “Roses and chocolate aren’t my style. I think she’s been planning to mount the rest of her collection in her apartment, now that her youngest is out of the house.” He filches Spy’s cigarette and takes a drag. “Besides, she stole my gun from me the first time we met. I’ve promised to keep her well-supplied in armaments, so that she needn’t go stealing mine.”

“Sometimes I wonder what she sees in you.”

“Nothing terribly exciting, I assure you. I’ll be sure to tell you if anything comes up.” Red exhales and passes him back the cigarette.

Spy is about to retort that he has no need for the weekly RED Spy newsletter, thank you, but Sniper calls out, “Smoko’s over, mate! Get your sneaky arse back here and quit skulking under the bridge.”

Spy takes a deep draught of the cigarette and flicks the butt into the pile overflowing from the half-can.

“Duty and unwashed Australians call, it seems,” Red says, “Well, do think of something good, won’t you? I would hate for her to be disappointed.”

Spy reflexively avoids Red’s pat on the back, which usually has a knife attached to it, and darts back in to kiss him, disappearing as he pulls back. It’s dreadfully hard to get the last word with either of them, but it’s worth it for the look of rueful surprise that crosses Red’s face.

A few weeks. Surely he could come up with something good in that time.

\--

“Sniper. Hypothetically speaking, if you were ‘knocking boots’ with a rather beautiful but also rather dangerous ‘Sheila’—”

“You can quit it with the air quotes anytime, mate,” Sniper says over the rim of his mug.

Spy puts down his hands. “—What on earth would you get her for Valentine’s Day?”

“Gave m’old girlfriend a crocodile skull. It was a real nice skull. Still had all the teeth and everythin’.” Sniper sips his coffee thoughtfully. “I think she kept her keys in it.”

“You are a heathen and I do not know why I ask you these things,” Spy says, somewhat muffled by his head laying on the table.

“Did ya consider a nice caribou rack? Real useful as a hatstand.”

“Oh, wonderful. Very nice.”

“You could just ask her, ya know. Or would that be too un-suave for you?” Sniper raised an eyebrow. “Or you could even ask Scout. He’d know what his mom likes, yeah?”

Spy gives him an incredulous look.

“Or don’t, fine.”

Spy lifts his head up enough to scowl at Sniper. “That’s not the point. The point is, well.” He gestures. “It’s the principle of the thing. Knowing what a person likes and all that.”

“You should be fine, then, right? Findin’ that kind of stuff out is your specialty.” Sniper pats him on the shoulder and goes off to yell at Soldier for mixing up the decaf and the regular pots.

\--

Asking anyone else on the team does him little good, as Soldier’s idea of a romantic gift seems to be the severed heads of her enemies (practical, but lacking in romance), Heavy suggests poetry (Spy is not a poet), and Pyro comes back with a bouquet of slightly scorched daisies, roots and all.

Combing through his surveillance records does him little good. Scout’s mother is not very materialistic—offering her jewellery or flowers seems to miss the mark in some indefinable way. He can’t simply offer her a new holster, either, though it would surely be appreciated.

\--

The morning after his day off finds him in Scout’s mother’s kitchen, taking apart the radio with a vengeance.

He looks up from the bundle of wires to see Scout’s mother leaning against the door frame in her bathrobe, yawning.

“I was—well, the radio wasn’t picking up anything, and I thought, well.” He stops. “A beautiful woman shouldn’t wake up without music.”

She laughs, and gets the coffee pot out of the cupboard. “If you’re trying to make it into a burglar alarm, the one you’ve already made out of the toaster is working just fine.”

“Does it? That’s good.” Spy picks up the screwdriver and starts putting the radio back together. She surely has other safeguards of her own, and he knows it’s wholly unnecessary to add another, but. Well. Another one couldn’t hurt, could it?

She puts a hand on his shoulder and watches him, the percolator bubbling softly on the stove. “Never told me where you picked up all this stuff. Red’s good enough with basic things, and he’ll fix the leaky faucet if you ask him to, but I don’t think it’s a big part of spy training.”

Spy shrugs. “My father was an electrician, and my engineer at work likes me well enough.” He seals up the radio again and fiddles with the dials. “It’s a hobby, really, nothing more.”

She leans into him as the radio hiccups over a few channels, and then picks up the local station. “Well, seems fixed enough to me. Fancy an egg?”

He places a hand on her hip, lightly. “Of course. Red’s already gone, I’m afraid. Something to take care of.”

“Oh, that’s pretty typical. Scrambled? Over easy?”

“Over easy would be marvellous.” He pauses to admire the view as she bends over to get the pan from one of the cabinets. “Does he always leave this early?”

He doesn’t know why he’s asking this now. It was always strange to roll over in the mornings and to feel only one warm body against his side. The bed in Scout’s mother’s apartment was far too small for all three of them, but they usually managed.

She cracks a match, lighting the stove with a whoosh, and then uses it to light her cigarette. “Yeah, pretty much. Red’s a strange one, sometimes. Hey, I just got him to leave a toothbrush here,” she says, smiling ruefully.

The radio announces the morning jazz program, and clarinet filters out of the speakers. The right speaker is still a tad unreliable.

“Do you know his name?” Spy doesn’t know what’s prodding him to ask these things. He could be asking her about her flower preferences. Some useful information.

“No. He doesn’t know mine, either—not my real one, anyways.” There’s a soft, vulnerable look in her eyes. “We decided long ago that the grand romantic gesture of trust was not necessarily something we wanted.” She passes a hand through her hair, the curling ends highlighted by the sun from the window. “Why? I hadn’t taken you for a romantic, honey.”

He shrugs. “Curiosity, that’s all.”

“I could probably find out his name. Sources and all that. Or even if I just asked him,” she muses. “But—well. I’m happy.”

She places an egg before him and kisses him full on the lips.

\--

In the end, he finds something. It still doesn’t feel perfect, but it’ll do.

\--

February fourteenth is apparently a day for megalomaniacs.

“So you’re saying that between the three of us, we still can’t figure out how to defuse this bomb and save the Malaysian prime minister,” Scout’s mother says doubtfully.

“Seeing as we are actually strapped to the bomb at the moment, it might be more difficult than we previously thought,” Spy returns.

“Details,” says Red.

Fortunately, Red is rather handy with knots, and within minutes, they’re already beating their way through a fray of inept minions.

“Dear, I don’t mean to dent your masculine pride, but I think your talents would be better put to use defusing this. Red’s pretty darn good at beating down henchmen, you know. Must’ve gotten a gold star in spy academy for putting bad guys’ insides in their righteous place,” says Scout’s mother, ushering him back towards the large, ominous-looking bomb.

There’s even a timer and a pair of red and blue wires. He rolls his eyes.

A shot sounds behind his back, and he twists around to see Scout’s mother taking cover behind a convenient vehicle. “Don’t you worry your pretty little head about these suckers,” she says, laying out an impressive array of guns that had presumably come from her cocktail dress, “I’ll cover your back.”

He nods, and starts prying the control panel off with the first thing he finds in his pockets.

He hears Red dropping back to their position. “How are you on ammo?”

Another shot. “Runnin’ low, sugar.”

Red sighs showily. “I suppose I’ll have to give this to you earlier than expected. It’s loaded, ma chere,” he says, and tosses over a beautifully-wrapped box. Scout’s mother dismembers the wrapping quickly, and pulls out, sure enough, another gun.

“I love it already,” she says, a grin in her voice. “I’d kiss ya, but I think that guy to your ten o’clock would cap you in the head.”

“Ah, but I would die happy!”

“Hm, do you want to take care of that group of unruly-looking types over there? Wait, I’ve even got just the thing for it.” With a flourish, she pulls out a slim box from somewhere else in her cocktail gown and tosses it over to Red.

He opens it with a grin. “Explosive cigars? Really, you shouldn’t have.” There’s the clicking of a lighter, a few satisfied puffs—“Cuban, even! I don’t know how you get these things.”—and a large explosion, presumably from where Red had tossed the rest of the cigar. “Simply magnificent.”

“Thought you’d like ‘em! Whoops, watch your three.” Two more shots.

“I hope you don’t mind if I hold off on your gifts for a few moments,” Spy tosses back, his fingers deep in the guts of the bomb.

“Not at all,” Red says, “The presence of all of our limbs in approximately the right place will be quite enough.”

To make a long story short, he manages to disarm the bomb, Red and Scout’s mother clear a way through the minions, and the Malaysian prime minister is very grateful for their assistance. Well, and then the self-destruct for the base activates, and Red gets caught in a bit of the explosion, but there isn’t a hole in the pacific large enough to destabilize the earth’s orbit, so Spy counts it as a win.

They’re all a bit singed. Spy bumps up against Red’s side as he pats out a small portion still smouldering merrily on Red’s shoulder. Red leans a bit more heavily on his shoulder, only wincing a bit when walking jolts his thigh.

“Stop smiling like a fool, you’re making our dramatic getaway look ridiculous,” Red says.

“I think you already have that taken care of,” Spy shoots back. “Honestly, you couldn’t even remember to look out for shrapnel?”

“You’re the one who was supposed to have had the explosion under control,” Red says, rather petulantly.

“I stopped a madman from destabilizing the earth’s orbit. Surely that’s enough, even for you.”

“So, what did you get me?” Scout’s mother says eventually, smiling.

“I, ah.” He digs inside his pockets, unearthing a few rubberbands, some wires, a ballpoint pen, and—nothing else. Red hisses softly as Spy jerks back to look at the burning wreckage. “Well. So much for that.”

Scout’s mother laughs, and he keeps babbling. “It was a hairclip with a dissimulated blade, if you must know. I must’ve forgotten it after I used it to pry open the circuit board. It was a nice blade, too, sharp. Our sniper pointed me in the direction of a guy who knows his stuff. But maybe you already have one.”

She smiles even wider at that, and leans up to kiss him on the cheek. “Well, it went to good use, then.”

\--

Spy finds Red under the bridge at smoke break, as usual. “How’s your leg?”

Red waves his concern away. “Our medic healed it up without a problem. I see you’re wearing that new watch from our dear mutual friend. You do like your gadgetry, don’t you?”

It’s quite a nice watch. She had apologized for getting something from a catalogue, but she’d seen him mooning over it so often that she couldn’t resist. Spy has to resist the urge to check the time more often than strictly necessary.

He laughs when he sees the hatbox in Red’s hand, taking another box from his side and handing it over to him. “If we’ve gotten each other the same hat, it will be utterly embarrassing. We simply can’t be wearing the same thing at the prom, mon cher.”

He opens the hat box and lifts out a powdered wig.

“To go with your beard,” Red says, straight-faced, opening his own hat box and settling the fez upon his head.

“My, but we make a dashing pair,” Spy says.

Red chuckles and adjusts the fez so that it sits at a rakish angle. He reaches forward and adjusts the wig on top of Spy’s mask, even though Spy is fairly sure that there isn’t a hair out of place.

“There. Now you’re almost as dashing as I.”

“If hats become a Valentine’s Day tradition, I’m definitely going to need a larger hatstand,” Spy says. Perhaps Sniper had a point with the caribou skull.

“Planning for next year, already?” Red says, smoke curling out of his mouth as he lights a cigarette. “Ours is not a profession built for longevity, and you know it. Long-term plans by spies are notoriously prone to some unforeseen abbreviation.”

Spy turns to him, irritated. He does know this.

Red passes his hand over Spy’s side, pressing against his belly. “Come on, you haven’t even seen the card.”

Spy digs around the tissue paper in the hatbox and finds a heart-shaped piece of cigarette box, saying:

“Roses are RED  
Violets are BLU  
I sure would hate  
To have aim like you”

Spy blinks. “You are a terrible poet.”

“My middle name is Baudelaire, mon cher.”

“And it’s ‘yours.’”

“I despise slant rhymes.”

“I will be investing in that hatstand, you know.”

“Ma chérie does appreciate a man with good taste in haberdashery.” Red turns away to grab their usual ashtray, but Spy can see the quiet smile hidden behind his hand.

Next time, perhaps, they would even have a proper dinner for the occasion. But if they didn't, well. Spy doesn't mind.


End file.
